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So what’s the replacement?
For private messaging? Signal was always better. The way I use Telegram, and the way Telegram should be used, is like another public social media. I use it for following channels that give news about things I’m interested in.
Why not Signal?
All completely irrelevant to most people. Nobody they know is on those platforms.
There are only two alternatives to the Big Tech messengers that are anywhere near critical mass: Signal and the shady one we’re talking about here.
Though I would love Matrix to go mainstream.
This is sadly the exact reason it will stay like this. People can’t reach me because i don’t use WhatsApp? Well bad luck. Use a better app or just don’t. I can’t reach them because they only use WA? What a bummer but so be it.
As long as people install WhatsCrapp because some distant aunt still uses it for the xmas-greetings, it will continue to be #1.
Doesn’t it get lonely though?
I remember the times where we didn’t have a tiny computer with us all day to be reachable. And if I’d be lonely because i don’t give a rats ass about WA, fb and the likes, that’d be indeed lonely but not due to that
I was talking about your attitude. Lol.
And what is it with my attitude? To have a strong opinion?
I feel like there needs to be an incentive in mind for those apps to bring in ppl. People care about privacy but won’t even delete FB, let alone use a different messaging app
If they cared about privacy then they wouldn’t use a searchable public database like FB.
I think there’s misconceptions, trust being put in the wrong place, unawareness involved, or simply they don’t think it through, rather than not caring (anectodal/IMO). E.g. “I don’t have anything to hide, so what if they collect everything”.
If we could build a tool to gather such info, that’s easily accessible and for free, to show all the data available on you in the marketplace - that might make them uncomfortable. And then perhaps they’ll start to try and understand why they’re uncomfortable, and why this is bad.
I love the premise of Signal, but there are too many red flags. Some of my issues are:
https://simplex.chat/
regarding its UX, nothing close exists; when it comes to converting normies, so you have someone to actually talk to, then there are no alternatives. that’s a pretty shitty state of affairs for something that shoulda been solved a long time ago.
lesson learned, I guess, don’t put all your eggs in one basket and have multiple fallback solutions. I’ve begrudingly moved to Signal and I’m cursing it out at least once per day, can’t believe the navel-gazing, self-righteous cluelessness behind it; but that’s the best there is at the moment. it’s beyond shitty that we’re having trouble achieving what we had in like 2012 by way of XMPP and friends, let alone surpassing it.
XMPP is still around although there’s a constant campaign trying to claim it’s gone.
because things moved forward in the last decade or so and it’s not viable. the same way matrix and element and those ridiculous things aren’t viable and never will be. can you use it today? absolutely. can you convert normies to it and make it an actual widely used comms platform? no. fucking. way.
this is coming from a guy running their own prosody instance and utilizing rocketchat on two separate client instances. yeah, I know how to set it up and deploy it; but the amount of absolutely credible complaints I get from normies forced to use it staggering.
XMPP would be viable in theory but for whatever reason no one wants to build a modern client out of it.
How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:
modern as in stable, good UX, plug-and-play, and supporting features a modern chat client is expected to have with zero hassle.
the stuff needed to convince your mom to install it.
Matrix?